Pirate Bay takes on YouTube, Hulu with The Video Bay

By IBT Staff Reporter On 06/29/09 AT 3:19 PM

The creators of the popular BitTorrent search engine The Pirate Bay have turned their sights to a new market - streaming video - with a new website that is already billed as a rival to YouTube and Hulu.

The new video sharing website, The Video Bay, will offer pirated TV shows and movies through a web browser, instead of having to first download the torrent and watching it through a player.

The Video Bay, which has not yet announced its official launch date, will allow users to simply stream video or audio content on their site which is like a Flash-based clone of YouTube.

Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak that there is still a lot of work to do behind the scenes. The encoder is not finished yet and he design is also a work in progress.

The move will be seen by some as provocative, given that the founders of The Pirate Bay were found guilty of breaking copyright law and were sentenced to a year in jail in April, though they are currently still free men.

The site is currently in a pre-launch test phase, and the creators warn that the site may not function at all.

Don't expect anything to work at all, says a note on The Video Bay site.

This site will be an experimental playground and as such subjected to both live and drunk (en)coding, so please don't bug us too much if the site ain't working properly.

In our own tests, we weren't able to play any videos or audio on the site.

The launch of the new site follows the application by Pirate Bay for a retrial which was rejected by the Swedish courts.

Earlier in April, a court in Sweden jailed four men behind The Pirate Bay and ordered them to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) to a handful of entertainment companies, including Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Bros, EMI and Columbia Pictures for facilitating copyright infringement.

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